Much has been written about privacy in the context of conversational and voice assistants. Yet, there have been remarkably few developments in terms of the actual privacy offered by these devices. But how much of this is due to the technical and design limitations of speech as an interaction modality? In this paper, we set out to reframe the discussion on why commercial conversational assistants do not offer meaningful privacy and transparency by demonstrating how they \emph{could}. By instrumenting the open-source voice assistant Mycroft to capture audit trails for data access, we demonstrate how such functionality could be integrated into big players in the sector like Alexa and Google Assistant. We show that this problem can be solved with existing technology and open standards and is thus fundamentally a business decision rather than a technical limitation.

翻译：关于对话助手和语音助手在隐私方面的讨论已有很多。然而，这些设备实际提供的隐私保护进展却微乎其微。但其中有多少是由于语音作为一种交互模态的技术和设计限制造成的？本文旨在重新构建关于商业对话助手为何未能提供有意义的隐私和透明性的讨论，并通过展示它们*能够*如何实现这一目标。通过为开源语音助手Mycroft添加数据访问审计追踪功能，我们证明了类似功能可以集成到Alexa和Google Assistant等业内主要厂商的产品中。我们表明，这一问题可以通过现有技术和开放标准来解决，因此从根本上说，这是一个商业决策而非技术限制。